Chocolate Chocolate Moons Read online

  Copyright © 2012 Jackie Kingon

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 1477561803

  EAN-13: 9781477561805

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62110-610-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011919692

  CreateSpace, North Charleston, SC

  TO AL

  FOR HIS SUPPORT AND LOVE

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  1

  THESE WORDS CHANGE my life:

  “Congratulations, plus-size student! Based on your cholesterol readings, body-fat ratio, Fibonacci number sequence for digesting chocolate, and high school cafeteria records, you have won the Good and Plenty Scholarship for two at Neil Armstrong University on the Moon. Call this toll-free number to collect your prize.”

  Until this moment, my life has been filled with diets, promises to diet, failed diets, exercise, therapies, nutritionists, acupuncture, hypnosis and memories of falling over the marbles rolled in my path at school as my classmates laughed and yelled, “Molly Marbles, round as a marble, fat as a moon.”

  I suck in my breath, pull up my bra straps, push my hair behind my moon-shaped face, crack each finger and toe, and call the number. Then I call my boyfriend, Drew Barron, who is far heavier than I am.

  “Pack your bags, sweetheart. We’re joining the class of 2333 at Neil Armstrong University on the Moon where the gravity is light, the classes are right, and the livin’ is gonna be easy.”

  One month later Drew and I sit on the Earth–Moon shuttle feeding each other our favorite candy, Chocolate Moons. We savor its rich dark chocolate coating for as long as we can before our tongues slip into the dense truffle center. We pucker our lips, kiss, and swallow. I lean back wide-eyed and look at Drew.

  “These are so delicious,” I sigh, “they should be called Chocolate Chocolate Moons.”

  “You’re right,” Drew says, closing his eyes and letting the last sweet morsel slide down his throat. “Can’t have too much of a good thing.”

  I turn toward the window on my left. When I crane my neck I can see the Moon coming very close. Drew leans in to get a better look. Its glowing gray surface is slowly covering the window until it is the only thing we can see. I sit silently and wonder if I made the right choice, my excitement masking my nervousness. Suddenly a red light above blinks “Warning: Gravity Change” and under that, blinking green, “Seat Belt Release.”

  We yank to attention.

  “So soon,” I murmur.

  Drew pales and white-knuckles his armrest.

  “It’s time,” I say, prying his sweaty fingers free.

  We stand, shift from foot to foot, and shuffle with the others toward the door.

  My damp palms flutter like little birds. I spread my arms, lower them to the smooth cool railing, and slide forward until I stand at the threshold’s flashing lights. I descend a few steps, extend a toe and step on to the Lunar Port’s silver-and-black tiled floor.

  My body looks the same, the soft skin jiggling beneath my arms, my butt reaching way beyond its proper place, forming a humongous Z with my tummy, but I feel as light as a whipped egg white in a floating island dessert. I leap, higher than I thought I could, toward a sign that says “Weighing Area,” step on a large round circle embedded in the floor, and read the numbers floating before me. My 287 Earth pounds are 47.6 Moon pounds. I raise my arms in triumph. I throw my head back and shriek, “Miracle! Miracle! It’s a miracle!”

  Drew hesitates in the doorway. “Outta my way, fat boy!” snarls a man shoving him through. Drew quivers, and then he bounces like a ball on springs toward the weighing area laughing out loud ignoring the stares. His 385 pounds are 65.

  A flight attendant shakes her sleek blond hair, frowns into the confusion of sights and sounds surrounding her, and mutters to no one in particular, “You can always tell the new arrivals.” She waves her luggage chip over a bag and scoots to the slide-run.

  I squint through the high clear dome that protects us from the vacuum outside and gasp at the billions of unblinking diamond sharp stars against black velvet space. Without an atmosphere the familiar words twinkle twinkle little star are now as meaningless as my former weight.

  Drew slows and jelly-rolls near me, pushes his dark curly hair from his eyes, and gives me a serious look. He straightens and stands; his elephantine shape stops jiggling. He walks toward me on legs that look like hundred-year-old oak trees. I grab his hand. My voice cracks. “You know, we’re never going to see a blue sky if we stay on the Moon.”

  Drew grins and pulls me close. “But, sweetheart,” he says and laughs, “we never have to see a scale either.”

  Part frontier town, part research center, every café and market in Armstrong City crackles with the energy buzzing from scientists, architects, engineers, and more miners than those who finally dug the hole from some kid’s backyard in North America to China.

  My scholarship for writing the winning essay, “The Joy of Salami,” pays the rent on a small condo in a crater near the university. It is the first school either of us has attended where we look average and fit right in. Everyone jokes that the Moon is made not of green cheese but full-fat mozzarella. We hold hands and march around singing, “When the Moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.”

  Drew studies media and marketing. I major in culinary arts and, which I thought was a whim, minor in criminology. It was a strange combination of classes that overlapped when studying chemical compositions of foods, and poisonous reactions on worlds with different gravities and atmospheric pressures. I also learned techniques for observation that come in handy sooner rather than later.

  Like college students everywhere, we party hard and drink the local moonshine that tastes a lot like beer. We eat and dance, eat and make love, and have heated philosophical discussions like if Eve made apple pies from the forbidden apple tree in the Garden of Eden, would God let her and Adam remain so they could open a bakery? And, if not, is there a God?

  Several times a week we swim at the university’s pool floating like balloons in bathing suits we were too embarrassed to wear on Earth. Shopping is divine: everything fits or has to be taken in.

  It doesn’t matter that Earth’s light shining on the Moon doesn’t look as romantic as moonlight shining on the Earth; I’m happier than I have ever been in my life.

  But, alas, my happiness is briefer than a frozen margarita on a hot summer day.

  One morning when soap slips from my han
d and slides to the floor, I bend to pick it up and find a half-empty bottle of vanilla birth control pills stashed under the bathroom sink.

  Mine are chocolate!

  Three weeks pass. The mystery of the vanilla pills is solved at the Man in the Moon costume ball. Wearing my salad costume, in memory of all my former diets, I watch as Drew is called onstage. Dressed as a ball of green cheese encased in a floating onion ring, he receives the Best Costume award from last year’s winner, a student named Colorful Copies. CC, as she likes to be called, is a plain-looking girl with brown hair and brown eyes. She is heavier than I am, wears a 50DD bra, and dyes her brown eyebrows rainbow colors. Her fondue-pot costume with its multicolored fork headdress is stylish if you like that kind of thing.

  When I see CC inch closer to Drew and swoon, I toss inside my salad costume. I hear “Your green cheese would feel so good in my pot.” Then she bends and sinks her teeth so deeply into Drew’s onion ring that it spins.

  Suddenly I feel like a pizza cut into more than eight slices, more stunned than if I saw the prophet Elijah actually show up at a seder table, more grated than a Parmesan cheese. How could love have made me blind? Like those nights Drew came home late not hungry for anything. Anything! And me chalking it up to hard work and ambition, which as it turns out, depending on definitions, was in fact technically true.

  CC and Drew dance the first dance. They circle near me. “Drew, sweetheart,” she says in a loud voice so I can hear, “you are the best melted cheese I ever ate.”

  Hearing that, I yank the green peas that hang like cultured pearls around my neck and hurl them at Drew.

  “Ouch,” he winces holding up his hands to ward them off. “Cut it out, Molly.”

  Several peas land in CC’s fondue pot. “I hate vegetable fondue,” she hisses in a spiteful baby thin voice, the kind of jeering voice that makes me want to push a chocolate cream pie into her face but I would never because I couldn’t disrespect and ruin all that chocolate.

  Instead, using what’s at hand I rip the carrot sticks off my shoulders; free the tomatoes from my chest, sever the corn dangling from my waist, tear the curly endive wrapped around my hips, and hurl everything at them. Splat!

  CC’s light goes out under her fondue pot. She reaches up for a fondue fork.

  I glare at Drew.

  Drew looks at CC. She lowers her arm and narrows her eyes. He wipes tomato pieces from his face.

  CC glowers at me.

  I look back at Drew.

  None of us say anything. We all know what it means.

  On our way home Drew and I are more rumpled than empty candy wrappers. Finally, in bed, as my head hits the pillow, he murmurs, “Night.” It was not good.

  The next morning before I can say granola, Drew’s bags are packed and he announces that he is moving in with CC.

  “What does she have that I don’t have?” I sob to a friend. “Is she prettier than me?”

  “Nope.”

  “Is she smarter than me?”

  “No way.”

  “Have a better personality? Is more charming?”

  “No to the first and no to the second. I can’t believe you don’t know. Everybody knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “CC is the daughter of Carbon Copies, owner of Carbon Copies Media, the Moon’s largest media conglomerate. And CC is his heir apparent.”

  2

  DREW’S AFFAIR WITH CC doesn’t last. He and CC have such differences that they can’t even agree on how many filets in a mignon, something the average school child knows. But when they went head to toe about what’s beyond the bed and the bath, a topic Drew had given many hours of serious thought, he knew he made a mistake. Nor did the job CC promised that her father would give him materialize. Not after Drew reached over Carbon Copies’s desk to shake his hand and knocked to the floor and shattered his rare autopen-signed photo of George from Washington with his arm draped around redheaded Cherry Tree lying about.

  After enduring two weeks of the silent treatment from CC, and trying to salvage what was left of his troubled relationship, Drew buys her a gift. It’s in a small black velvet box.

  “I hope it’s what I think it is,” she says, crunching several Fontina cheese-coated potato chips.

  “How can it not be, sweetheart?”

  CC opens the box, peeks inside, and frowns.

  “What’s the matter, don’t you like it?”

  “But it’s a diamond ring.”

  “Yes. Ten carats.”

  “Are you completely out of touch? What’s the matter with you? Ever since so many diamonds were discovered on the outer planets, the diamond market has tanked. No one wants diamond jewelry anymore. How cheap can you be?” She closes the box and gives it back to Drew. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  Drew is stunned.

  CC smiles slyly and bats her eyelashes. “Now, a lump of coal,” she coos, “that’s a rare and beautiful thing.”

  Bored and disappointed with his life, Drew sees an ad for Congress Drugs, a company that makes the Freedom Plan, low-calorie diet alternatives. Congress Drugs is looking for plus-size sales representatives who will lose weight eating their products. Those selected will have their “before” and “after” pictures featured in ads. However, the company’s headquarters is on Mars.

  “Mars? Mars? A red rock millions of miles from a good restaurant?” shouts CC jumping around like fire ants just nested in her cleavage. “Why would anyone want to go to Mars? Why would anyone want to eat fake food? Why would anyone want to lose weight? Big is beautiful!” And with that she takes the chocolate cannoli that she was eating and crushes the shell between two fingers. “That’s what I think about going to Mars! And don’t think I won’t tell my father about this, you post-nasal drip!”

  Meanwhile I have to learn to cope without Drew. Fighting back tears I make a turkey sandwich. I spread honey mustard over a crunchy seeded roll. I feel a little better knowing that I could never be depressed enough to eat boar’s heads, whose signs I saw in my Earth history class hanging in every twenty-first century deli.

  Soon I hear that Drew left CC and was headed for Mars to work in some kind of diet food company. I feel like a newly risen popover waiting to be buttered and bitten. I cut and lighten my hair, buy a sexy black skirt with some swing to it, and splurge on a bright yellow spandex blouse that shows off the right places.

  I wander into a bookstore and finger the Moon’s best seller, Is It a Food If It Has Less Than 100 Calories? Then I go to my favorite place: the café.

  A young man sits alone tapping a small screen.

  “May I join you?” I ask. “My name is Molly Marbles.”

  He shifts a broad shoulder and looks up. My heart flutters. His deep and sonorous voice says, “Cortland Summers. But only if you will share today’s special: a pound of melted garlic butter with a side order of focaccia bread.”

  “My favorite,” I say, wishing he had said chocolate decadence cake.

  Cortland’s brown hair is twisted with a clip that looks like a G clef. Earrings like little solar systems dangle from his ears. His eyes are as dark and dense as chocolate cherries. He wears black jeans and a black sweatshirt with lightning-gold lettering that says “Cracked Craters.”

  I lean in, making sure my blouse hints at what lies beneath. “And the Cracked Craters are…?”

  “My band,” he says thumping his chest. “I write music. Maybe you’ve heard “Like a Floating Stone”? Third-place runner-up for a Naughty Nebula.”

  “No, but I’d love to hear it.” We add our contact codes to our palm directories, a calling device that looks like a tiny dot in the center of our left palms.

  Soon thereafter I receive a chocolate decadence cake with a little cube on top containing a holograph of Cortland and his band in concert. For the next twenty-eight day moon month, a cake with a cube arrives. I’m so overwhelmed I can’t tell if I’ve got a sugar high or I’m in love.

  Next, Cortland and the Cracked Craters sta
nd outside my window. He croons the mid-twentieth-century hit “Earth Angel.” When I hear him say, “five, six, seven, eight,” and the beat rises, I run outside, hair flying, panting to the rhythm. He grabs me from the doorway, spins me like a dreidel, gets down on one knee and pops the question.

  “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes,” I shout. “A thousand splendid moons!”

  Our wedding is held in a domed crater covered with white silk flowers. My dress makes me look like a cream puff bouncing down the aisle. As Cortland and I exchange rings, The Craters play “Clair de Lune.” My parents, who pay for the wedding, say that if they knew how much food a plus-size person’s reception needed, they would have been less generous. But aside from remarks about tapping into their retirement savings, they are happy for me, especially because I am not marrying Drew Barron, about whom they now admit they had reservations.

  I work for the MTA, the Moon Transit Authority, giving out parking tickets.

  “You know, Cortland, I’m very overqualified for this job.”

  “What makes you say that?” he asks, annoyed because I’ve interrupted him reworking “Moon Rover,” his latest composition.

  His finger jabs the delete key.

  “But it doesn’t matter because I’m not going to be working there much longer.”

  Silence. More deleting.

  “I’m pregnant,” I say.

  Cortland looks up. “Pregnant?”

  “Twin girls.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure, I’m sure. It’s not hard to be sure.”

  Cortland takes a breath and holds it for a very long time processing the information. I wait until his eyes open wide, meaning: all clear. “Everyone’s naming their children after places on Earth. What do you think of Los Angeles and Quebec?”

  “Los Angeles as in ‘Lois’ and ‘Becky’ for Quebec,’ he muses. “I like it.”

  “And I’m carrying them internally rather than egg-crating them at ‘Free Delivery.’ It’s more expensive, but I want to do it.”

  “Expensive?” Cortland sweats.

  For years Cortland moonlights as a real estate salesman and is very successful. We live in a polished stone condo that is built into the side of a crater. Its cheerful bright colors offset the stark rugged landscape outside the crater’s protective dome. We have lots of interesting friends, take a yearly vacation to a ranch in a canyon called Canyon Ranch, and, as I love to cook, give wonderful dinner parties. But best of all, blond, curly-haired Becky and Lois dance and sing to Cortland’s music like songbirds and win every children’s talent contest. By the time they are fifteen, they are tall, willowy, and graceful. As proud parents we think they could become stars. Life is good. I have all I have ever wanted.